Mystery of ‘lawn businessman’ who organised world’s biggest bank heist

The tunnel built by Paulo Sergio and his gang of thieves who robbed Banco Central do Brasil in August 2005.

To date, police in Brazil only know him as Paulo Sergio. For years, Sergio has remained elusive as chances of ever finding him and bringing him to book get slimmer with each passing day. His was a well-choreographed robbery – probably the most intelligently executed – that left Banco Central (Brazil’s equivalent of Kenya’s Central Bank) over Sh6 billion poorer.

It was in early August 2005 when it emerged that thieves had broken into the bank’s vault and stolen a record amount of money. The astonishing part, though, was that the thieves carried out the heist undetected and without triggering any of the bank’s alarm systems.

According to UK’s The Independent, who were among the first to carry the story in international press pages, the tunnel’s entrance was a block away from the bank in a building that was supposedly being used to run artificial grass business registered under Sergio’s name.

“A guy called Paulo Sergio turned up in a van and the place stayed closed for 15 days,” a hotel owner on the same street as the bank was quoted by The Independent. “Then he brought some workers, put up his artificial lawn business.”

The gang dug an 80m tunnel, fitted it with wood panels and installed electric lighting and rudimentary air-conditioning; their final engineering feat had been to drill through a metre of steel-reinforced concrete, accomplishing their aim clinically without attracting even a whiff of attention.

“It’s something you see in the movies . . . They dug a tunnel that goes underneath two blocks. They’ve been digging for three months,” investigator Francisco Queiroga told the Reuters news agency.

To say that Sergio and his criminal colleagues were a sly lot would be an understatement as they went about life in the neighbourhood mollifying hearts with gifts and integrating well with others; distributing free promotional baseball caps and even taking out adverts.

The business was a façade used by the gang to hide their true purpose. The vault at Brazil’s Banco Central that weekend teemed with money but they took only the used notes that the bank had no records of serial numbers.

They had covered the room from which they worked with white powder to make fingerprinting difficult. The police, however, got a copy of the identity document that had been used to rent the building and it had Paulo Sergio de Souza’s name.

The stolen money had already been withdrawn from circulation, and was therefore taken not from private accounts but, in effect, from the economy itself.

Three months later, 13 suspects had been arrested, and some of the money recovered.

Other members of Sergio’s team remained on the run with Sergio. A man named Luiz Fernando Ribeiro who, it later emerged, supervised the tunnel crime, was later found kidnapped and murdered – possibly to wipe out evidence. To date, the identity of Paulo Sergio remains a mystery.